Man, I wish I was around the boards when this thread first started, but now that it’s been resurrected, I’ll share 
I thought some of my stories were about true roomates from hell, but after reading some of these, they’re downright tame. But here goes.
Roomate #1: My first apartment, shortly after moving to California. This guy was one of my best friends from high school, and in a case of fortunate (at the time) coincidence, happened to move to the Bay Area at about the same time I did. He was staying with some mutual friends for a while, but eventually their landlord got wind of this and he had to move out of there. So, I mean, this guy was one of my best friends, right? So of course I offer him a spot in my apartment ‘until he can get his own place’. I had a 1 bedroom, but I was more than happy to let him use the couch. Seeing as how we’d been so close for so long, I didn’t mind the close quarters, it was nice for a while.
Problem #1: ‘Until you can get your own place’ turned into ‘Until the lease expires in 9 months’.
Problem #2: He never showered or washed his clothes. Eventually, he stopped wearing underwear (how a GUY can do this and wear JEANS still baffles me), because they were just ‘too nasty’ (but not nasty enough to warrant moving from their spot next to the couch, apparently).
Problem #3: He paid me about $100/mo for rent, on a $1300/mo apartment, which wasn’t really horrible, considering I had invited him in the first place, and wasn’t expecting much out of him anyway. I mean, just letting him use the couch didn’t really cost me anything, did it?
Problem #4: Except that this boy would devour $200 worth of groceries in 2 days. I have never seen anybody who can eat that amount of frozen waffles and cereal in one sitting. He was also a vegetarian, so I’d buy… you know, vegetarian (and mostly healthy) things. I’d even cook now and then. These, he would usually let rot. When we ran out of cereal, waffles, etc. He would resort to eating spoonfulls of peanut butter and squirting honey in his mouth. (and then lecture me on how he was worried for my health, since I probably wasn’t getting enough zinc in my diet). He also would not clean up after himself. I would come home from work, and there would literally be a hansel-and-gretel style trail from kitchen to couch, starting with an open cabinet, then a trail of open jars and crumbs leading up to the couch, and culminating in dirty dishes on the couch, which he would never pick up.
Problem #5: He smoked a lot of pot, and invited his friends (most of whom were at least acquiantances of mine, anyway) over to join him. This, in and of itself, didn’t bother me TOO much. I didn’t like my apartment being crammed with pot-addled youth every night, but all in all, it was an alright group of people, and I wasn’t worried about the cops busting down the door or anything. What bothered me, is that he would dump all the ashes onto the (white) carpet. The first time he did this, he looked at me with a quizzical glance and said “you don’t mind if you ash on the carpet, do you?” (as he was doing so).
Roomate experience #2: This was during they heyday of the bay-area housing crisis (“Oooh! A 30sq ft. studio for only $3,000 a month! They’re practially giving it away!”). We found a shack in the Tenderloin district (not the nicest part of town), and I was basically living in a closet with 3 other people. One of them just took off and left about a week later. The other two (a couple), then proceeded to go completely insane. The male half of the duo started threatening both myself and my cat, and his girlfriend turned into a complete raging alcoholic, and decided she wanted to become a stripper. This, in and of itself, was a shocking enough – I should mention I’d been friends with this woman for about a year or so, and was really quite fond of her. She was a bright individual, with a good deal of practical experience that could get her a pretty decent job (and she had one, but she lost it after she started drinking heavily), so this was rather upsetting. Then she started asking me for money to pay my share of the bills. Fine, I say (looking back on it, how could I have been so stupid?), here is a check for a VeryLargeWadOfCash[tm], it will cover this month’s rent, and my share of all the various utility/cable/etc. bills. 2 weeks later, she demands even more money for the SAME BILLS. At this point, I pretty much told her to get lost – I was actively looking for another place to live at this point. Which brings me too…
Roomate #3: After I moved out of the hellhole in SF, I got a nice, quiet place out in the boonies with another friend of mine. We had known each other for a long time, and had a falling out some years back. But, we were young at the time, and after getting to know her again after a few years, I came to the conclusion that she had really grown up quite a bit, and would make both a good friend and roomate. That was a mistake. First off, she was very clever in finding ways to get out of paying things. She did it in a way that played on my sympathies for her as a friend, and I was making pretty decent money at the time, she was not. Truth be told, I didn’t really mind all that much that if I spent a little extra money, it would make us both more comfortable. She was my friend, after all.
But the first problem was re: smoking in the house. I do not like people to smoke in my house. I don’t really mind it when people smoke, but I don’t like my house to smell like smoke, or be full of smoke, etc. This greatly upset her. “Look,” I said, “I’m sorry, and I realize that it’s something you want to do, but I can’t compromise on this. If you only smoke in the house half the time, it still makes the place smell like smoke. I am shelling out an additional $300/mo for all the furniture in the place, and pay the extra money so we can have the cable modem and all the cable channels, I don’t think it’s that much of a sacrafice.” Her best counter was “But I don’t enjoy smoking as much when I have to get up and walk the extra 3 FEET to the porch.” sigh. So she smoked in the house while I was gone. We had a deadbolt that could only be opened from the inside, meaning that if I came home after work and she had locked it, I couldn’t get in even if I had the key. The first time this happened, I didn’t really think much of it. I was home sort of late, and we hadn’t lived there for that long, so that’s a pretty easy thing to forget about at first. Until she opened the door, and I noticed the place smelled like smoke. It wasn’t recent, however, it was just sort of a lingering odor. I questioned her about it, and she said she had been standing on the porch with the door open and had been watching TV. So I gave her the benefit of the doubt. This continued to happen constantly. I figured she probably wouldn’t stop even if she knew that she wasn’t being all that sly, but that she would at the very least continue to hide it from me if she thought she was getting away with it.
This was the least of my worries. There were a couple of friends of hers from back east who were thinking about moving out to California. I knew both people, and thought highly of them. Of course, roomie thought it would be a great idea if they stayed with us. Thanks to my experience with Roomie #1, I was wary of this. I told her that I didn’t mind helping out her friends, but that a two-bedroom apartment was going to be cramped with 4 people, and that I wanted to set a reasonable time limit (say, a month or two, depending on specific circumstances) for them to have established themselves in jobs and be able to get a place of their own. She says my demands are reasonable, and that she will pass them along to her friends.
I find out after all is said and done, that not only had she told her friends that I had “no problem” with them staying with us until the lease ran out, but that she had been saying all kinds of nasty things about me. Most of which were fabrications, but some of which centered around my disapproval with respect to smoking inside. So both these people pretty much hated me when they got to California, and decided to make it their main mission in life to make my life miserable (while not getting jobs, even looking for their own place to live, and eating all my groceries, and not letting me use my computer).
These people also had all kinds of characters over at all hours of the night, and decided it was great fun to play music on MY STEREO, at high volumes, in the wee hours of the morning. Well, this didn’t work out too well for me, seeing as how I actually had a job to go to in the morning and such. This lead to many, many fights.
Then, the original roomie turns total psycho b-yotch on the other two, and we end up sort of huddling together in a common defense. This is when I find out that they had heard all sorts of terrible things about me from day 1, and that they were under the impression they were free to stay at our apartment until the lease ran out. Eventually roomie #1 calls the cops on us for “assaulting” her (she had charged at one of the other people, started ripping out her hair, etc, etc. I pulled her off and pinned her until the other involved party could get to safety). A report was filed, but nothing really came of that. Then she finds another room, sticks us with her portion of the rent, and, for good measure:
- Calls the apartment complex and tells them that there are two people living in the apartment against the terms of the lease (a fact which I had warned about in the beginning), and consequently gets us served with a 30-day notice of eviction. This came right after my company had gone bankrupt, and I was out of work.
- Gets our [rented] furniture taken back. The stuff was in her name, because when we were first getting the apartment, I had the bright idea of saying “hey, I’m really busy right now, so after lunch, would you mind running down to a CORT showroom and signing us up? Don’t spend more than x dollars/mo, but I’ll cover the bill”. So I actually PAID for everything, but it was in her name, and she was able to get it all taken back.
I actually left a lot out of that last one, but this post must be monstrous already.
And while we’re on the subject, I want to share another story, although this one isn’t about one of MY roomates, but it’s sort of funny.
In college, I had two good friends, let’s call them “J” and “M”. J and M were dating, and M usually spent the night in J’s room. J had a roomate, let’s call him “C”. C had absolutely no social skills, whatsoever, and made no secret of the fact that he was quite infatuated with M. He was harmless for the most part, though, just annoying. J and M would sometimes engage in little shenanigans at night, when C was supposedly asleep. Nothing particularly scary, and it might not have been the best judgement, but hey, kids will be kids. Well, after a while, they realized that C was not asleep, but was paying quite a bit of attention to them. So, one night, when everything was quiet, J and M start making all KINDS of noises, just the sort of wacky stuff that you know they have to be making up. Regardless, within a few seconds, they heard a loud WHUMP as C got up so fast to see what they were doing, he hit his head!
